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Monday, March 24, 2014

Humor and Learning Torah

When we began this website, many people were drawn here by divrei Torah, but then they were put off by the humor. Since they could only recognize serious divrei Torah when they're bound in a black book, they never came back. Others were drawn by the name Havolim, looking for letizanus, for jokes, and were put off by the serious divrei Torah. What can I do. The Beis Halevi first printed his teshuvos together with his divrei torah on the parsha, but in the later editions he separated them into two volumes, saying that the audience that was interested in the one was totally uninterested in the other. Lehavdil, I've done something similar, and have begun posting the serious Divrei Torah on my other site, Beis Vaad.

But the truth is that there is no contradiction between humor and learning Gemara.

Stimulating the mind through humor is mentioned in the Gemara (Shabbos 30b) where it says that before he would begin the shiur, Rabba would say something that would make the students smile, and then his tone and demeanor would change, the mood in the room would shift from light-hearted to an extremely tense focus, and he would begin the shiur, expecting absolute attention, unforgiving of even the smallest lapse.

Rashi says that one should begin with something comedic, and the rabbis/students would laugh, and their minds would open from the happiness.

ובדחי רבנן. נפתח לבם מחמת השמחה

I don't think most people realize how wise and effective this method is. It sounds, to some, like just another quaint story in the Gemara. So for us, the modern thinkers, who don't believe anything if it's anecdotal, here are some interesting studies.

A 1976 study by the late professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University, Avner Ziv, (the author of the entry on Humor in the Encyclopedia Judaica) found that those who listened to a comedy album before taking a creativity test scored 20% better than a control group that had not heard the routine.

A 1987 study by Isen, Daubman and Nowicki asked participants to solve a creative logic problem. In the control group, two of fifteen solved the problem. The other group was shown a comedy film before being presented the problem. In the latter group, nine of the fifteen solved the problem.

Remarkably, there are very highly regarded studies that show that laughter and humor increase the immune response significantly- not by some meaningless scale, but by increased lymphocyte blastogenesis and killer-cell activity (a good thing.)

So in that light, when you read the Gemara about Rav's method of teaching, you realize that no, it's not just another quaint habit of those ancients. Chazal's life was the pursuit of wisdom and they lived to discern the truth; they were well aware of the benefit of humor in opening the mind, and they used it as a very serious means to enhance their students' learning.

Briefly, I want to point out that there are many ways to understand what Chazal mean when they say that בדיחותא enhances learning.

First we have our famous Gemara, as we brought above, where a humorous word opened their minds.

The Gemara seems simple enough. But it's not, because there's a fascinating Ran on that Gemara in Shabbos 30b that has a very different way to learn it.

So a simple reading of the Gemara would be that there are two things that can benefit from בדיחותא; Hashra'as HaShechina and learning. Rashi explained that בדיחותא opens the mind. We have a Yalkut (ילקוט שמעוני מלכים ב׳ רכ״ו באד״ה כי לולי פני) that says exactly like Rashi-

He seems to be saying that the reason learning benefits from בדיחותא is because learning requires Hashra'as HaShechina. Davka because Hashra'as HaShechina is enhanced by בדיחותא, learning is as well. The benefit to learning is not direct; the way it works is that the בדיחותא creates שמחה של מצוה (as I will bring from the Pnei Yehoshua); the שמחה של מצוה brings Hashra'as HaShechina. The Hashra'as HaShechina then enhances the learning. This is very different than Rashi. But we can understand why the Ran says it- after all, the idea that learning Torah involves Hashra'as HaShechina is a Mishna in Avos 3:7-

As to what the בדיחותא consists of, I'm going to leave that to you. Obviously, it is the type of בדיחותא that a Rebbi would tell his talmidim before a shiur, and involves chochma and torah. Any other type, as the Pnei Yehoshua says in his introduction to Kesuvos, is מוקצה מהדעת. And the truth is, it's hard to learn the Gemara any other way, because the Gemara comes to the idea of בדיחותא as a means of attaining שמחה של מצוה. What kind of בדיחותא is שמחה של מצוה? So the Pnei Yehoshua says that it either means a farfetched but seemingly logical dvar torah, or an interesting aggadeta.

(The Pnei Yehoshua's proof is not 100% muchrach. It could be that simcha shel mitzva is simcha that is sought in furtherance of a mitzva, like eating on Shabbos. It's not the eating b'etzem that's the mitzva, it's the simcha for the purpose of being me'aneig es haShabbos. Here, since the purpose of the simcha is to enhance learning, it automatically is called simcha shel mitzva, and it can be anything clever and humorous. The proof to this is that the Gemara brings from David Hamelech 'והיה כנגן המנגן ותהי עליו יד ה, that it was music that brought him to Ruach HaKodesh. Music is just music, but it brought ruach hakodesh because he had it played davka because he wanted to come to Hashraas HaShechina.)

Very parenthetically, when I was thinking about this article, I was reminded of Norman Cousins, the very liberal critic and author. Mr. Cousins was an advocate of the curative power of positive emotions and laughter, and believed it extended his life far beyond what his doctors told him he could hope for. He assiduously rejected his Jewish heritage, but, nebach, there was an essential goodness about him that no doubt contributed to his daughter recapturing her Jewish heritage for herself and her own family. Her article is really worth reading. After that article, read this one at Aish.